Mushi Pan variations for dough and topping?

I'm in love with Mushi-Pan right now and I also tried my own one some days ago! I also made some Matcha-butter-cream and Sesame-peanut-cream as a topping. It was delicious, but I want to try more flavors.

Do you have any tips for me how to variate the Mushi-Pan-dough a little bit?

What is your favorite-Mushi-Pan ingredient? (for example, chocolate, fruits or any other cream as a topping...?)

Mushi pan is very close in texture and spirit to British steamed puddings, so you can look up recipes for those and get a lot of ideas. E.g. any kind of dried fruits, preserved ginger (with the syrup as topping!), lemon and sugar, marmelade, jam, etc...

Ah, in that case I can give some suggestions - steamed pudding is something I used to make often when my son was small.

From memory, these were good:
Vanilla essence mixed in, golden syrup on top
Ginger mixed in (powdered or crystallised or both), golden syrup on top
Cocoa mixed in, chocolate sauce poured over (this would be chocolate custard with a steamed pudding)
Sultanas mixed in
Sultanas and cinnamon and nutmeg mixed in
Dates, either mixed in or on top
Dried apricots mixed in, apricot jam on top
Apricot jam mixed in, but you need to use less baking powder and add a little baking soda because of the acidity of the jam.

Note that a steamed pudding is turned upside down to serve, so where I say "on top" I actually mean put on the bottom of the bowl/dish and cooked underneath the mixture. Then when you turn it over it's on top and all soaked in (except dates, which obviously won't soak), but you don't have to turn it over if you don't want to.

Hi guys! :D Thank you so much for your ideas - I'll defenitely have to try all of them :D And thx maki for the advice about the British steamed pudding. Never heard of it - I'll have to google for it now!

I made Maki's recipe twice (with half the ingredients) and it turned out better the second time with a nice thin layer of muslin.

However, my right wrist/hand doesn't work too well right now and I don't own an electric whisk so the egg beating had to be done with man-in-the-house power.
As he's not around today I looked for another recipe and found this one which has a yogurt tang to ithttp://cookpad.com/recipe/359999
It's in Japanese but by running it through the Excite translation tool and halving the amounts (I'm only interested in cooking what will fit in my rice cooker) I came up with this

The instructions weren't that clear to me but I just blended the egg and yogurt, added the oil, added the sugar and vanilla essence.
I sifted together the flour and baking powder in another bowl and then loosely folded the flour into the egg/yogurt/sugar mixture being careful not to over mix the batter (there were a few lumps of flour - it didn't seem to matter)

Next I spooned the amount into 5 silicone cup cake holders (the sort for making cup cakes or muffins) but I only half filled them and put these on the steaming tray in my rice cooker over a couple of centimeters of water. I pressed the 'steam' button and left them there for 20 minutes - I figured it would take 5 minutes for the steam to form which would give around 15 minutes cooking time.

The cakes were really pretty and had puffed up beautifully. The lasting aftertaste is definitely that of yogurt. I'll add a spoon of lemon curd instead of the vanilla next time and some grated lemon rind. I think I might do the same with orange marmalade and orange rind and add some grated carrot in there too (there was a comment from someone who had made the recipe on the original Japanese site saying she'd added grated carrot). If I do add curd or marmalade I'll take into account Bronwyn's advice about counteracting the acidity of these ingredients.
But for today, I've enjoyed these plain versions best with a bit of blackcurant jam.

EDT:
Just to add that I've made the lemon versions of the yogurt mushipan - so good I made them twice (we really, really love these!)
1 egg - beaten
50gms yogurt
2 teaspoons lemon curd (lemoncurd is mostly butter/fat so you won't need the oil in the original recipe)
grated zest of 1/4 lemon
20gms sugar
- blend these together and add
75gms cake flour and
3/4 teaspoon of baking powder and
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
which has been sifted together.
-Fold this in loosely without overmixing.
-Immediately drop the mixture into 5 or 6 silicone cup cake cups or ramekins.
-add half a teaspoon of lemon curd to each portion ans smear it over the top with the back of a spoon.
Steam for 20 minutes

Next time I'll try using coconut yogurt and replacing the vanilla (or lemon curd) flavouring with a couple of spoons of coconut cream. A little dessicated coconut should be nice in there too - a lemon curd topping could be nice, pineapple or mango seem appetising also. I suspect any flavours that work with yogurt would work with this recipe.

oh thx for your great recipe! :D
I tried something similar to that recipe some time ago.
It was not with yogurt, but with cream-cheese/farmer cheese, sake and lemon-juice. So it has no aftertaste of yogurt.

oh dear, mushipan has become a little bit of an obsession. I'm blaming you, token!

I couldn't wait until I got the coconut so I used the basic yogurt mushipan recipe, substituted the yogurt for soft cheese (kept the vanilla essence) and added a tablespoon of powdered green tea/matcha to the flour and baking powder. The twist is that I smeared the tops of each portion with blackcurrant jam (Not so long ago, Starbucks in Japan topped their matcha frappucinos with blackcurrant - this was the inspiration). If I ever feel really indulgent I'll fold in some white chocolate chips to the matcha batter. The amazing thing for me is that they don't need it - each mini matcha-blackurrant mushipan has less than a teaspoon of sugar and a light smudge of jam and yet they're as sweet as they need to be. Lovely with a cup of tea!

my computer was down, so i couldn't try making mushipan today- no recipe! however, i had one for lemon curd lying around, so i made my first batch of that instead.. there's nothing comparable in germany. i liked the result very much, tomorrow will be lemon mushipan time. matcha and black currant sounds delicious, too..

oh, whow, i'm so full!
i just made loretta's recipe with yesterday's lemon curd and ate 5 of them! gooooooood. thank you, thank you, thank you! my stomach is very happy now.
those "teaspoons" are 5 ml? i did it that way and it turned out fine. is a tablespoon 15 ml in your kitchen?

matcha/raspberry is next (still got some raspberries in the freezer). i don't have any green tea because i'm an earl grey tea drinker. if i want to get green tea for flavouring desserts, what kind am i looking for? i've seen something like that mentioned somewhere 'round here but can't remember where..

I'm so glad you liked them!
(It was my birthday on Sunday and the lemon curd ones were my 'cake', I ate four - I grudgingly gave away two otherwise I would easily have eaten them all!)

Yes - I consider 1 teaspoon to be about 5 mls and a tablespoon to be about 15mls. I realised that the half teaspoon of lemoncurd I smear over the top is usually about a third of a teaspoon - a little lemon curd goes a long way in this recipe. Also, whether the curd stays near the top of sinks to the bottom (to me it doesn't matter as the mushipan taste just as good upside down) seems to depend on how thick the yogurt and hence the batter is.
You could get away with not doing any weighing if you use (for the original vanilla yogurt recipe)
5 level teaspoons of sugar (4 for the lemon recipe)
2 bulging tablespoons yogurt
2 HEAPED tablespoons flour - and I do mean heaped!

The best green tea to use is matcha. It's a very special tea made from the best tea leaves which have been ground into a powder. The downside to buying matcha is that the price reflects the quality (it's expensive!) and it goes stale quite quickly, even in the fridge. token had already made mushipan with matcha butter which is why I suggested putting matcha powder into a mushipan batter made with soft cream cheese (mascarpone really is ideal for this).
I personally don't use matcha enough or frequently enough to justify buying it on a regular basis. However, I do always have good quality sencha so my budget cheat is to grind up sencha in a pestle and mortar in order to make matcha for cooking with (after grinding I sift the powder through a fine tea strainer and discard any brown bits). You need a bit more powdered sencha than you would true matcha and the flavour isn't quite as 'pure' or intense but it does taste good. I wouldn't recommend buying sencha especially for this purpose though, and if you did want to try matcha, I'd recommend holding off until the weather gets warmer (you can dissolve the matcha to flavour vanilla ice cream and make green tea ice cream or milkshakes with it - much easier to use up the powder before it gets stale this way!)

I bought a pack of solid coconut cream today (the kind found in Asian and Caribbean shops, it costs the equivalent of 50 US cents). I'm going to be trying that today by grating it into the batter. Coconut and raspberry tend to go very well together so I'll report back.
EDIT - THE RESULT:
I still think that there is a way to tailor the yogurt recipe to make a delicious coconut version, but just adding grated cheap creamed coconut isn't really the way. The result is edible but doesn't touch on the lemon curd version. I think my initial thought of using a coconut yogurt would work but it really does need a better quality coconut cream as well as this... and I think the dessicated coconut is almost essential. One day, when my wrist is all better, I'll try this again but with grated real coconut and from hand massaged coconut cream, I haven't given up on the idea of coconut mushipan just yet. Next attempt will be the carrot and orange.

As good matcha is made from the most tender, most fragrant leaves in their first flush, tea tips that have been painstakingly sheltered from the rays of the sun before being picked and dried and ground and packed, submitting matcha to the frost of a freezer seems rather brutal to me (not that mushipan or ice cream is any less indignant an end to this fine tea!).
This is probably a kneejerk emotional reaction to storing matcha and freezing is probably fine for matcha one intends to cook with. However, something is screaming inside at me that matcha meant to be drunk hot in the proper way is probably not supposed to be frozen.
I should be seeing a matcha authority quite soon and I'll get a definitive answer from her.

As for pan
I'd always thought it was from the Portoguese 'pao' and I've seen a few other instances where only the first syllable or two of a foreign loan word gets adopted into Japanese (i.e. terebi - television, biru - building, depaato - department store - this phenomenon happens in other countries too, think how many US immigrants had their ancestral names castrated at the Ellis Island registry office and there's a great parody of the British tendency to cut names here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGmD4fOqWgo).
Naturally, I'm delighted that the 'pan' in panko or mushipan means bread as it's the same word in Spanish.

the french, portugese and spanish word for bread are all derived from latin "panis", as in "panis et vinum" or "panem et circenses", so they're all similar.

somehow, it wouldn't feel right to me to use a product like matcha in baking- there's all that knowledge, love and care spent to make a fine, traditional product, i can't just go ahead and bake it into sweets! it seems disrespectful. like using the best bottle in the cellar for making red wine cake..
i'll have a go with powdered sencha and see how it works out.
hm, mascarpone, the world's fattiest cream cheese! good idea.

somehow, it wouldn't feel right to me to use a product like matcha in baking- there's all that knowledge, love and care spent to make a fine, traditional product, i can't just go ahead and bake it into sweets! it seems disrespectful. like using the best bottle in the cellar for making red wine cake..

Wonderfully put! That's why I bake with the crappiest stuff that doesn't deserve to be called matcha. ^^

I suppose it would be worth the cost if a similar amount of knowledge, love, and care is put into the baking...but I seldom go to that much trouble with my pastries.

However, something is screaming inside at me that matcha meant to be drunk hot in the proper way is probably not supposed to be frozen.
I should be seeing a matcha authority quite soon and I'll get a definitive answer from her.

Turns out that I'm far too precious (who'd have guessed?) as matcha doesn't suffer that much in the freezer. Sure, it's better to consume it when it's fresh, but it's much better to freeze it than allow it to go stale.

What will ruin matcha is condensation. So the tip when storing matcha in a refrigerator or freezer is to put it in an air tight container and, when you remove the container from the cold, let it reach room temperature before you open it. This helps keep the contents safe from the perils of condensation.

I've never made mushipan but I'm planning on trying the recipe rehfilet gave me in the Bento For Life thread. However I am wondering - can you make it in silicone baking cups? I have been coveting a set but couldn't bring myself to buy them. However, if I can use them to make these, I would get some! So can you use the silicone baking cup for mushipan? I'll probably try some of the suggestions in here too if it works :3

Thank you! I did as you said and they worked perfectly. I was very nervous because it was my first time using both the rice cooker as steamer and the silicone cups for cooking (I usually use them for bento separators). I tried the normal recipe that Maki posted, and my husband says he'd rather have it a bit sweeter. I'm thinking of putting maple syrup in the batter before steaming.

Thanks for the suggestion! This is what I did and it turned out noticeably sweeter. I liked it, and so did my daughter! My husband has a fierce sweet tooth though so I'll probably have to add even more.

A quick question for people in terms of matcha: I love matcha tea, and I love everything about drinking it the traditional way. And because it's so expensive, I can see not wanting to use good matcha in baking or ice cream. But I also love matcha in things other than tea; green tea ice cream is my favorite flavor, green tea lattes, matcha smoothies, etc. Some coffee shops sell latte grade matcha. Do you think that would be okay to use in baking or other sweets? I mean it was just going to be made into a latte....